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at the door

Maddie and Lily

We survived another Valentines Day: an
entire day of poor-quality candy given out with alarming frequency
and absolutely no censorship whatsoever, along with a class party
filled with cupcakes and ice cream sundaes and cookies and . . .
you get the picture.

Every year we walk through the Sugar Minefield, and this year it
claimed Maddie as its victim; her meltdown Friday afternoon was
colossal. CoLOSSal. I thought we were going to have to cancel the
dinner we had planned with a near-and-dear friend in from out of
town. But she pulled herself together, and admitted she could tell
she’d had too much sugar.

Progress, I think.

This year, though, in addition to the whole sugar overload, I saw
the other frightening tightrope of Valentines Day for the first
time: the whole girl-boy dynamic.

Cora: “It’s a negative integer, mom, and I already
taught myself. And the homework doesn’t say you have to do
something we’ve already learned.”

Me: “Well then, go for it.”

Cora: “Oh, wait – I have to draw a cartoon picture
demonstrating it. How am I supposed to draw a cartoon of a negative
number?”

At this point Maddie jumps in and begins excitedly brainstorming
with Cora all the different ways she could do a cartoon drawing of
a negative number problem. After listening to it escalate for five
minutes while ideas like a three-dimensional cartoon to show the
“absence” of a number were thrown out –

Me: “Cora, maybe you should just stick to positive integers
for this.”

The Olympics are on, and we are one of
those families that watch a lot of it. For the first time, the
girls are old enough to remember the last Olympics and have been
looking forward to this for a few months now.

We pre-record everything so we can a) watch it back at our leisure;
and b) skip over all the commercials and filler stuff. So
we’re about a day behind, which is fine by me.

Don’t get me wrong –we don’t watch just the last
two minutes of a race: we watched the qualifiers for the
men’s snowboarding slopestyle before the opening ceremony had
even happened, and we watched every bit of the finals as well. Poor
Maddie had trouble sleeping one night, worrying about Sage and how
he’d hold up, and if McMorris’ rib injury would keep
him off the podium.

Over the weekend I got out a big trunk of
stored toys: things the girls didn’t need on a daily basis
any more, but still wanted to hold on to. Maddie had asked for a
glimpse of some old stuffed animals, and I thought it would be fun
for the girls to see some of their old favorites.

Within minutes of my dragging the trunk into the living room,
we’d had a stuffed-animal explosion.

For the rest of the weekend, the girls had an elaborate game going
on consisting of several shops/stores in a small town
“somewhere”. Cora opened up a toy store, while Maddie
opened up a doctor’s office and a pet shelter. Cora set up a
cash register, arranged her stuffed animals attractively, and hung
“open” and “closed” signs, while Maddie
filled out adoption certificates for the shelter stuffed animals
and hung out a “the doctor is in” sign when she was
home.